Town-life a hundred years ago presented many contrasts to what it is now in Scotland. Means of locomotion being comparatively scanty and also expensive, communication with England was too serious a matter to be undertaken by any but those who had plenty of money or urgent business. And the number of Englishmen who found their way north of the Tweed was correspondingly small. The Scottish towns, too, though connected by lines of road and stage coaches, were far more cut off from each other than they have now become, since they have been linked together by railways. They still to some extent continued to be centres, to which the landed gentry betook themselves for part of the winter. Hence they retained some old-world ways and local peculiarities, which modern intercourse has more or less completely effaced. They were much smaller in size and more compact, for the vast acres of suburban villadom, now surrounding our cities and larger towns, had hardly begun to come into existence. They were likewise so much less populous, that each of them rather resembled an overgrown family, where everybody of special note was known more or less familiarly to the whole community. [Sidenote: DIRTINESS OF THE STREETS] There can be little doubt that Scottish towns were once almost incredibly dirty. Drainage, in the modern sense of the word, was unknown. Edinburgh, especially at night, must have been one of the most evil-smelling towns in Europe, when with shouts of ‘Gardyloo’ the foul water and garbage of each house were pitched out of the windows. The streets were thus never decently clean, save immediately after a heavy rain had swept the refuse into the central gutter, which then became the channel of a rapid torrent. Laws had indeed been framed against throwing foul water from the windows, and Boswell tells us that in his time the magistrates had taken to enforce them, but that owing to the want of covered drains the odour still continued. When he walked up the Canongate with Johnson, who had just arrived, he could have wished his companion ‘to be without one of his five senses on this occasion;’ for he could not keep the lexicographer from grumbling, ‘I smell you in the dark.’ In Byron’s youth the same state of things continued, and he could still say tauntingly to Jeffrey, For thee Edina culls her evening sweets, And showers their odours on thy candid sheets.